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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia is actively hostile. Apple is slightly willing to get Linux to work. It's not comperable.

Apple provides no documentation or any other resources. Nvidia at least provides their closed source drivers and has put in some effort in open sourcing some parts of them. Obviously Nvidia is not great but it is still much, much better than Apple which just totally ignores Linux and there is no guarantee some exec might decide that they need to patch the ‘security holes’ which allow Linux to even run on m1 at some point in the future.

I believe Apple has been making changes to actively support the Asahi community in regards to bootloaders and such.

They have, though it's not clear if it's "engineer at Apple realizes with one small change they can make it easier for Linux" or "internally Apple is fine with supporting Linux on their hardware but they're not openly doing so".

I'm actually moderately surprised they are not actively helping, as often having a second OS option allows for various fun legal tricks when importing, bidding on government contracts, etc.

I think Apple would have to be stupid to block booting other operating systems on the devices they already have sold. This could easily lead to lawsuit, similar to one that Sony had when they removed OtherOS functionality from PlayStation 3.

Apple actively helped Asahi Linux by changing the boot process. NVidia actively works against Linux by using things like the GPL condom. Nvidia is like that kid that is forced by a teacher to do something and then proceeds to do it in the most shitheaded way but just enough for it to work while actively working against the spirit of the request of the teacher.

Apple in contrast has helped Asahi Linux for literally no reason. It wasn't requiest, it wasn't even required. It just made life easier for Asahi Linux.

Apple helped Asahi allegedly. There is no explicit support of Asahi from Apple, just to be 100% clear.

The change you're talking about is likely to have been for Asahi, but no statement from Apple so far about it.

Allegedly? Apple added a feature useless for themselves but something Asahi Linux benefited from greatly. Can't really make it more clear then this. Or do you expect Tim Cook to announce Asahi Linux in the next keynote?

Maybe the "allegedly" is misplaced, I hope my overall point is clear anyway. Apple haven't "officially" helped Asahi, the change could have be made by a single contributor to the kernel for example, or more of a "why not" change without regarding Asahi specifically. We (unless you work at Apple) don't really know at this point.

Ask marcan_42 for how much support Apple have provided. When it has come up, they have been pretty open about it...

Marcan has been pretty clear in saying the same thing as I've said here. Apple doesn't have much use of such a feature themselves (apparently), but no communication was made of why the change happened. However small chance is that the change was made for other purposes, we simply don't know why it was made.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1554395184473190400

> "Okay, it's been over a year, and it's time to end the nonsense speculation."

> "I have heard from several Apple employees that:"

> "1. The boot method we use is for 3rd-party OSes, and Apple only use it to test that it works, because"

> "2. It is policy that it works."

> "Hacker News peanut gallery, you can drop the BS now. It's not an "assumption" that this stuff exists for 3rd-party OSes. It couldn't "be something internal Apple uses that could go away any minute". That is not how it works, it never was, and now I'm telling you it's official."

> "And this isn't even news because @XenoKovah (who invented and designed this entire Boot Policy 3rd party OS mechanism) already tweeted about this whole thing a long time ago, but apparently it needs to be restated."

So no, we do know why this was made and no, Marcan hasn't made the claim that you have.

How the hell is a company that releases official drivers to support an OS working "against it"? How did you get yourself into a mental state where you convinced yourself that a company that officially supports your OS is "working against in" and is somehow worse than a company that will do absolutely nothing to support the OS?

But it's still discouraging to the companies that actually support Linux.

Ok it’s on them to make a laptop that can compete with an Apple Silicon Air then

Reply on news.ycombinator.com